Apparently I was supposed to announce my temporary vacation

byHeshy FriedonNovember 26, 2012

In the blog world people need constant content and if they don’t get that content they typically don’t visit your site. Of course, I was surprised last month when my pay per click advertising was at it’s regular rate and so I went into my stats to take a look and it appeared that 2,000 people a day still thought that 6 years of material was worth reading and couldn’t care less that I was supposedly defunct. I’ll try to explain to you what happened.

If I were someone else trying to figure out where the helige Frum Satire disappeared to I would point directly at the obvious, his wife. How many other bloggers have disappeared into oblivion after getting hitched and realizing that they were mere mortals and the only important things in life were paying bills, getting a minivan and complaining about yeshiva tuition on frum forums.

Here’s how my disappearance went down. I was in Baltimore for a conference held by the Jewish Week, called The Conversation. I have been to a number of these “exclusive” invite only events where some Jewish organization flies you halfway across the world to discuss issues facing Jewry today. Apparently the biggest issue is the a catchphrase you don’t hear often in the frum world, called Jewish Engagement. We need to do whatever it takes to keep Jews engaged, regardless of the fact that they are being in engaged in distinctly non-Jewish things. Needless to say, it was an interesting event in which I would be considered a hardcore right winger.

Even though I had fun at The Conversation, I was terribly sick at the time and explaining to a million Federation heads and Reform rabbis why exactly I was chosen to be among them didn’t help. Several weeks later I realized that I hadn’t been online in close to a month and didn’t miss the babbling bullshit narcissism of my blog and facebook pages. Was I really doing anything to change the world? Did I even matter, my wife tried to convince me that even if I made one person smile it was worth it and to think about all those emails of thanks and gratitude throughout the years.

Naturally during this time I was also working long hours, trying to get in as much mountain biking and wine drinking as possible and trying to figure out how to communicate with women without making them cry. Life seemed so full, I had no time to blog (of course I did, but I wasn’t in the mood) The n shit hit the fan and lets just say that in the span of a week I received some crazy kapara for whatever evil things I had done in the past. It didn’t help that my kapara came right after Yom Kippur and that my Rav confirmed that it was definitely some good old fashioned The Lord will smite you stuff. To make a long story short, we had to deal with some very shitty landlords, identity theft and my car dying within the span of 5 days. Definitely the worst week and most stressful time of my life, we were even homeless for 3 days.

In the past whenever I have taken a break I have always announced it, but for some reason I didn’t feel like it needed to be said and I didn’t get too many complaints and people still commented and read the darned thing. Sure, my traffic dropped in half, but all I care about is that it’s giving something to someone whatever that may be. I proved to myself that I could get several hundred comments on a post, 700 likes on a post and 6 figure unique visitors a month, now I decided that maybe it was time to just go back to writing when I felt like and not forcing out material.

About a month ago I decided to start writing again, I tried to get into my blog and it crashed my computer every time. Then it just went down all together and then those darned complaints started coming in (the complainers didn’t appear to realize I hadn’t written in some time) So I had to go through the annoying process of finding a cheap website dude to clean up the site. I’ve been told that not having a regular web guy is not the best thing, but I’m not able to afford such things. Anyway, my old web guy came to the rescue and cleaned up the back end and so what you see is the same exact blog without all the clutter. Sure, I’d like some color, but I don’t have the knowledge of that.

So it appears I will start blogging again, time and weather permitting. I happen to be off today, but it’s 60 a sunny out and I need to tend to the winter garden I just planted (all veggies that contain evil insects) The biggest problem with blogging again is that I almost feel like just writing my random thoughts rather than commenting on contemporary Jewish life, maybe I’ll leave that to Fink.

Being from storm ravaged Belle Harbor, I have not experienced many bright spots this past month!!( one was Skyler and Simcha’s chuppa) It is great to have you back!! ( however, I’d much rather have heat and electricity!!) Bruce

It’s great to have you back! Your blog is an important component of the “frum” world, believe me, and a reality check just what the frum world needs right now. We grow from laughing at ourselves. Please keep it up. And, yeah, I apologize for mentally blaming your wife…

Hey heshy! How’s married life? I would mind reading your random thoughts 🙂 I just scheduled blog posts on my blog 3x a week for the next month and a half, so I’ll be having some new content coming out as well. 🙂

Glad to read that you’re back. I’m more sorry for all the “BS” it seems you went through. I also write & went through a dry roughly the same time as you. I can understand very well the desire to just not go to the computer.